Printing a data frame with column alignment (as shown in R)

Question

I have the following data frame in R:

> dframe Mean Median Candidates 85.68 60 NonCands 9.21 4 Multi 27.48 17 Mono 4.43 3 Multi NonCands 22.23 15 

I want to print it to a file and keep it beautifully formatted and aligned as shown above. I use:

 write.table(dframe,file="test",sep="\t", quote=F) 

which produces the following output:

 Mean Median Candidates 85.68 60 NonCands 9.21 4 Multi 27.48 17 Mono 4.43 3 Multi NonCands 22.23 15 

Since the data is displayed correctly formatted in the R environment, I thought it should be trivial to write to a file with the same format. Apparently, I was wrong. I tried playing with format() and write.matrix from the MASS library, but it does not give the desired result.

I saw several sentences, such as this one , but it seems too complicated and, more importantly, does not give the desired result when printing to a file with write.table() .

So, how can I print my data frame in a text file and look the same as in R?

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UPDATE

Following Justin's suggestion from his comment below, I installed the gdata library and used write.fwf . This is almost what I need:

 write.fwf(dframe,file="test",sep="\t", quote=F, rownames=T) 

outputs the following result:

 Mean Median Candidates 85.68 60 NonCands 9.21 4 Multi 27.48 17 Mono 4.43 3 Multi NonCands 22.23 15 

So, any ideas on how to get “Mean” and “Median” have shifted to the right to fit their respective columns?

Since this might be relevant now, here's how to create a data.frame file:

 labels<-c("Candidates","NonCands","Multi", "Mono", "Multi NonCands") Mean <- c(mean(cands), mean(non),mean(multi),mean(mono),mean(multi_non)) Median <- c(median(cands), median(non),median(multi),median(mono),median(multi_non)) names(Mean)<-labels dframe<-data.frame(Mean,Median) 

Answer 1

You can redirect print output to a file.

 max.print <- getOption('max.print') options(max.print=nrow(dframe) * ncol(dframe)) sink('dframe.txt') dframe sink() options(max.print=max.print) 

Answer 2

You can also use capture.output with cat

 cat(capture.output(dframe), file = 'dframe.txt', sep = '\n') 

Answer 3

 # Add the row names to the data frame, if you want them included dframe2 <- data.frame("Row"=rownames(dframe), dframe, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) # apply format over each column dframe2 <- apply(dframe2, 2, format) # print it out, make sure not to use quotes write.table(dframe2, "test.txt", quote=FALSE, row.names=FALSE) 

Answer 4

I liked the simplicity of Matthew Proud's answer, but unfortunately it does not offer a way to get rid of the names / line numbers for my situation; so I changed Ricardo's answer a bit:

 print.to.file <- function(df, filename) { cnames <- colnames(df) n <- as.matrix(nchar(cnames)) d <- apply(df, 2, format) n <- apply(cbind(n, nchar(d[1,])), 1, max) fmts <- paste0("%",n, "s") for(i in 1:length(cnames)) { cnames[i] <- sprintf(fmts[i], cnames[i]) d[,i] <- sprintf(fmts[i], trimws(d[,i])) } d <- rbind(cnames, d) write.table(d, filename, quote=F, row.names=F, col.names=F) } 

This gives the same result from Matthew, with the exception of lines / row numbers.

EDIT: replace trim with trimws .

Answer 5

Another way without line names based on the answer in mnel:

 prettyprint.df <- function(x, filename='dframe.txt', width=200) # Pretty-print data frame without row names { op.w <- options("width") options("width"=width) first <- max(nchar(rownames(x))) + 2 cat(substring(capture.output(x), first), file=filename, sep="\n") options(op.w) } 

Answer 6

To control the output, configure print.data.frame to your needs and write the output to a file, for example:

 capture.output( print.data.frame(df, row.names=F, print.gap=3, quote=F, right=F), sep="\n", file="out.txt" )